Experimental Investigation on the Bond-Slip Behavior of Corroded Strands

The high vulnerability of prestressed reinforced concrete (PRC) structures to the corrosion degradation has been highlighted by several damage cases occurred in European countries. Therefore, many researchers addressed this important topic in the last decade, carrying out bending test of full-scale PRC beams, to evaluate the residual structural performance of the corroded member. To better understand the global behavior of corroded PRC beams in flexure, the knowledge of fundamental issues such as mechanical properties and bond performance of corroded strands, prestressing action losses, and transmission length variations, is required. At the material scale, some experimental results obtained by direct tension test are available, while the studies on the strand-to-concrete interaction after the corrosion degradation are really few. In this paper, the preliminary results of an experimental campaign aimed to investigate the bond-slip relationship between concrete and artificially corroded strands are presented.